It’s April and the elections happened two months and one month past. It seems I’m coming to the party late except that this is just the beginning of what could become four years or eight years of hurt and a huge opportunity lost for a generation.
Smarter and better writers have written about this election and Chimamanda’s letter to Joe Biden stands out. Falz and Vector made music out of it, too. But in Igboland, a man is considered a poor orator if he says his brother has said that which he wanted to say.
The Igbos do not believe in one agenda said in one voice. They believe in multiple perspectives.
So where Chimamanda wrote to the American president, this is me writing to myself, writing to my imaginary grandkid, writing for posterity, writing to try to make sense of the abomination that was the elections of February/March 2023.
The last time I wrote about elections, it was my adoptive-fantastic country, the United States of America. Donald Trump had just won the American presidency against a truly qualified Hillary Clinton despite getting nearly three million votes less than Clinton and it drove me mad.
If you ever looked at America for guidance, on democracy and freedom, I wrote in that piece, this is your reality check. The land of Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr has nose-dived into the abyss of chaos built on hate and fear.
If I was mad in 2016, today my body is cut into seventeen different pieces and each piece owns its own psychiatric home of punishing madness.
For full disclosure, I supported Peter Obi of the Labour Party. I campaigned for him online and offline; I shared “vote Peter Obi” stickers in Enugu and Anambra States; I streamed campaigns online and attended one in person. I was a vociferous Obidient.
But I wasn’t stupid. I knew that the election could be free and fair and Peter Obi would lose. Yes, the politics of Nigeria is the politics of tribal interests in its various primitive forms so I knew that despite his sterling resume and the corrupt baggage on the neck of his closest rivals, Peter Obi was an underdog.
He was like Arsenal, trying to win the league title ahead of Man City, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Man United who have structures (whether you define it as Arab oil money or the bottomless pockets of American sugar daddies). A long shot but possible.
And yes, I was aware of rigging but I hoped INEC BVAS machine would limit this and the four years and 300 billion naira headstart INEC had would cripple the reach of riggers and deny them the power of making the difference between who won and who lost, who got 25% in a state and who didn’t, and who would eventually be declared the winner.
This is where I failed. It was a failure of imagination. No, not the situation where the thieves beat my imagination with brilliant machinations, no, they beat it with shamelessness.
I didn’t know we would have an election where a sitting governor would boldly go from one collation centre to the other seizing original result sheets and changing them with correcting fluid (Tipp-Ex kee you there) and rewriting it in favour of a party with less than 2% of the votes in the ward/state. I didn’t imagine a police commissioner defending child voters as adults with stunted growths and another police chief defending threats of violent disenfranchisement to the Igbos and people who look like them as “mere jokes”.
I didn’t fathom that the losing margins of Labour Party would be widened in the North East and North West while winning margins chopped off in Lagos, Anambra, Plateau, and Nasarawa States, and outright wins overturned in Rivers, Benue, Akwa Ibom, and Taraba States.
All in the glare of the world, with video and material evidence.
INEC and the compromised fellow who chairs it refused to review the results presented with papers no bank would honour as a cheque, no school would honour as a certificate, and no establishment would honour as a working document. INEC chairman dismissed all these with “go to court”. The media unlooks. International bodies make small noises but ultimately unlook.
It’s our problem.
And when I woke up to the news that the one who came a distant third and who cannot point to up to 1000 polling units out of the whole 290K units nationwide was the president-elect, I felt the need to hit the roads in protest.
You see, during EndSARS, we were told to leave the streets and get our PVCs, we did. Now, to be rudely told that our PVCs are useless feels like square one. We have been scammed.
Peter Obi asked us to remain calm and off the streets. They said he was dogged enough and experienced in fighting and winning his mandates back.
I didn’t agree with the lack of protest but you can’t be Obidient and disobey your principal. So we stood and watch APC and their non-juvenile juvenile fulminators grow in confidence enough to accuse Peter Obi of religious divisions and treason and to clone his password and try committing a crime in his name in the UK.
Shebi if we protested and they attacked us (how many people can they shoot?) they won’t have the time to be on the offensive while the sweat and blood of our stolen mandate are still fresh. And, really, who told you taking back your nation from plunderers who have raped her for decades is a handshake and slap on the back process?
It’s a Matthew 11:12 thing and so many of us are not ready to admit it.
If anything, we would be talking about the injustice done to us not going to social media to play defence and watch APC trying to paint us as unpatriotic and fascists (clap for yourself Wole Soyinka the old man who sits at home and cheer as children eat vulture for food).
So where do we go from here? The judiciary has no liver to correct this wrong and whoever paid the police, the army, the DSS, the media, Lagos-based grammar-speaking pastors, imams in the north, and INEC itself can easily buy seven judges with change. If they didn’t have the plan for the judiciary, they won’t have been bold to say go to court despite the open-air thievery.
I’m not holding my breath for redemption. But I’m not laughing off those who believe there would be some correction of sorts. I think all those talks of Interpol arresting Tinubu and Interim Government are someone’s coping mechanism.
You could ask how would an adult believe that Interpol would land with parachutes on election day and arrest someone about to be sworn in for a drug case that no major international media houses or government officials have commented on?
Well, if this theory would help allay the shock of seeing the country come so close to redemption but now removed from the corridors of redemption like a child snatched from his mother’s breast, mid-suckling, why not?
What I’m against is a perpetual clinging on a storyline that the guys at Jim Jam and Cartoon Network will laugh off. Decades from today, it shouldn’t be said that in 2023 we youths started a revolution, organised and registered new voters, organised and helped people collect their permanent voters’ cards, organised and got people to come out and vote only for our mandate to be erased with correcting fluid by a set of people who live in great comfort far from the ghetto bubble of the average Nigerian and whose grandchild have the assurance of affluence.
We must do something. This may be the last opportunity in the next 16 to 30 or 100 years to redeem Nigeria from the hands of the wicked. We can’t let it go without a fight, without a push, without letting the thieves feel the heat of their actions.
I don’t know when it will be. Maybe on the day of the handover or on the day the Supreme Court throws into the bin Peter Obi’s suit citing one technicality or the other.
See eh, I can’t say when. But I’m ready when you are.
Hard Voices 